by Seska Dragonslayer » Wed May 16, 2007 8:03 pm
I. Upon a Twilight Eve.
"Incredulous at best your desire to believe in
Angels in the hearts of men."
-Tool
She woke with a start. Beads of sweat, cold on clammy skin, flew in the frigid dark, landing on dusty floors where man had long since tread. The musty stench of eternal rot and disuse filled this place; filled her nostrils with a scent unaccustomed and unknown.
The girl child-apparent lay on the stone slab, feeling the weight of centuries in her limbs. Her mind fervently refuted the ghastly ghost-vision that had been imprinted upon it by dream or nightmare, providing other alternatives than the defeat it knew it had suffered. Victory parades danced in her heart, visions of people cheering the fall of darkness. Her mind provided the cold hard facts. Eventually.
She lay in stone cold bed, pondering. Time passed. Eventually, with the dust of ages shifting and sliding from her young frame, she sat upright and stared sightlessly into the gloom. Deep though it was, it was not perfect, except for in a corner of this chamber she had lain in; there the darkness was so deep and bottomless that she felt her soul in jeapordy simply by being near it. It sucked at her like a blackhole, beckoning, but she would not listen to its dark melody. Instead, she got to feet that felt full of led, sinking into the floor as though it were mud rather than dust. Clouds of the stuff sputtered as she took tentative steps toward the vague light, dirtying the allready blood-stained, faded-to-grey dress she wore. Her mind turned words over and over again, replaying the last moment of awareness with a surreal vividness. Over and over again she watched herself die.
Here she was reborn.
There were stairs, made of some strange stone that was seamless and most defniately man-made. At least then, she knew, the world of the hume-children had not flounder and fallen following her demise apparent. No, they had continued on. Perhaps the dark beasts' warnings were empty. Perhaps he had perished long ago...
Yes. Perhaps he had perished and death had never consumed her in the first place. She had slept.
At the top of the stairs was a strange door wrought of metal. She stopped in wonder in front of it, marveling at the apparent craftsmanship of such a piece and wondering further where she was, and what she was doing here. She tried the knob (not even knowing that it was a 'knob', never having seen such a device before) and tried to pull on it. The door gave slightly, a sliver widening into a crack of pale silver light as timeless and ancient as the world itself. She pulled harder on it, and with each tug it moved an inch or so, a mountain of dust piling up behind it and trumbling and billowing away with each disturbance.
She ended up having to squeeze through the gap because the door would only went so far before its hinges, ancient beyond recall, finally gave and the door itself had settled to the floor. It was an immense weight for one such as she to try to move by herself. Stepping into the hallf beyond, the wan light increased. She did not see it, at least in the standard sense. Regardless, she moved down the passage, following the light. She stepped over things that were strewn about the hall itself, but not once thought to inspect what they were.
*****
In the darkness of the once sealed and hidden room, in the confines of the one corner where another hidden passage snaked off into the distances under the city above, a pair of eyes opened, finally, and watched with vague interest as the ancient girl awoke and left the room.
They eyes burned a vague crimson.
After a while, the mystic eyes went out. The darkness within that room subsided to that of the norm; merely another nondescript place empty and devoid of anything except the rats and settling dust.
*****
A world in flames. Everything aflame with the screams of the dying and the haunted dead echoing from every corner of existence.
That was what the girl had expected to find upon awakening. Slyly, her mind insisted that that was exactly what should have been, but instead of the crimson glow on every horizon there was a blessedly peaceful cityscape instead.
She stood at the ancient empty doors of an equally ancient building made of strange stone, the windf playfully tugging at her waist-length silver hair. She had the carriage of youth, while at the same time the poise of nobility. In the pale light of the moon, her grey dress fit her body rather well, exceptionally tailored when it was made but ancient beyond recall now. Amythest eyes stared outward at the awe inspiring sight.
She stood staring for a very long time. Her eyes were wide with bewildered wonderment, her mouth a slack 'O' of amazement. All around her, amid abandoned streets paved with black stone, rose massive spires and towers of grey rock, seamless like the stairs and as tall as mountains. Not all of them were intact, but enough of them were to give a good impression of what this place may once have been. The streets were dead and empty, some overgrown, with ancient hulks of metal corroded to heaps of twisted steel. The girl paid them little mind, staring as a child stares at a skyscraper when he or she first sees one. It took a while, but the wonder faded, leaving a gaping hole where despair could begin to flood in like a returning sea.
She stepped out onto the shaped-stone steps and descended to the street, each footfall echoing in the lonely, deserted predawn city. Her eyes kept returning to the skyline even as she remained alert for threats in this strange world. Again, her mind returned to the promise of the beast.
She had tried to defeat it. It had won. She began to entertain the possibility that its curse was genuine, that she had slept centuries away while the world carried on. She stopped, and looked again the skyline. Gone on? It must have, but at some point it must have met a wall.
She began to walk again, musing.
*****
The sound began as the sky in the east began to brighten, turning the mirthless grey clouds into a veritable pallet of colour. The sound came from the direction of the rising sun, and was something that she had, of course, never heard before.
She watched behind a low wall comprised of some of the strange stone, most obviously bits that had fallen off of the sky-scraping building behind her, and there she waited in silence as the sun moved behind the horizon. All about her, nothing moved. It was as if the world held its breath in expectation of something either truely fascinating or awesomely horrid. In her experience it was often the latter. In a world with a kind, loving God she was sure it would be opposite.
It wasn't that she didn't believe in God. She did. She believed he was a cruel, malign bastard.
Her watching eyes saw nothing, but nevertheless she saw the pinpoints of light emerge at last at the far end of this....street? There were two, side by side from the look of it but still much to distant to discern anything else about them. Whatever it was, it was moving very fast. It weaved through the long since corroded hulks of steel and cloth and other substances since gone to dust. She watched warily, with growing astonishment, as the carriage - she was sure thats what it had to be, save the fact that it wasn't being pulled by horse or beast - came barreling down the long disused avenue.
She ducked down as it sped pass, an ancient and rusted machine of steel and....other things. She had no words to describe the see-through material that was constructed into the things side and front, as well as its back. She would have much enjoyed looking at it closer, but it was gone as fast as it had come, becoming nothing but a pair of receding red lights in the distance and then, finally, nothing. The sound faded.
She relaxed, sitting back, and then immediately tensed up. Something was being pressed into the back of her head, something cold and hard and dangerous feeling. She didn't turn around.
A hand frisked her silently. After it had finished, satisfied that she carried no weapons, she supposed, she was gripped by her shoulder and turned rudely around. A black thing, made of metal with a hole in it, was pointed at her face in a menacing way.
In front of her was a stooped woman, dressed in...well, rags really. They were a uniform grey, like her own, but unlike her own they were torn and obviously old. The woman who wore them was not young, either outwardly or in her poise. Steel-blue eyes stared back unflinching into her own unsettling amethyst, careful and calculating, studying her. At long last the woman decided that she was no immediate threat, and dropped the strange weapon to her well-portioned body. She grinned then.
"Do you speak english, by chance?" She asked in a voice much more civil and well-traveled than she would have expected from one such roughly handsome creature. She shook her head to clear her face of russet-red hair. It, like she, was dirty.
"I speak common, if thats what you mean..? The girl asked tentatively, unsure. English was a word that she had never heard before, either. So many things she had seen in the last hours, things unimagined back....back...
She let the train of thought slowly derail itself, settling back and watching the other woman warily.
"Common, english, whatever. Its all the same, sweetheart. Now, lets get off the road before that patrol car cames back around. We'd be in big trouble if they saw us." She said shortly, and then scrambled over the fallen massonry and back into the hidden depths of the building it had fallen from.
"Carr? ..." She whispered, in wonderment. A car? What a strange name. Perhaps that strange horseless buggy was a 'car'? She put the thought out of her mind, and did what she was told. What else was there to do? She certainly didn't know enough of this new and strange world to make decisions on her own.
Still, she had to be cautious. Her thoughts drifted to the dark dream of her slumber, and she shuddered.
Leery, she slowly crawled over the debris as well, and vanished into the welcome safety of its darkness.
*****
"So....lemme get 's straight. Ya aren't human? Wha' kind o' shit d'you think yer gonna pull on me!?" Exclaimed the russet haired woman. She laughed strangely, then continued. "I mean, I can understand vampires and werewolves and demons and dragons, no problem there. There was a time when there weren't such things, but they are here now. Here t' stay, if'n ya ask me. I've never heard of no magick people except in faerie tales, and that fra' m'childhood. Pull the other one, its got bells on." She said, laughing.
They were winding their way through the strange building. It was built out of 'concrete', she'd been told. Man-made stone, to go with their man-made mountains.
At first she'd been wary of the strange woman, buit her easy-going manner seemed to rub off on people, as it was doing to her. Here was a person you could trust, that was what the woman's body language and strange, somewhat hard to understand accent. The severity of her words had bled away once they were, as she had said, out of peril.
"I speak truely, so I do." The girl said, meekly.
"Eh? 'S that so? Well, I don't 'zactly care. So long as yer not one o' 'em bloodsuckers, I don't give a tin shit. Whats'ee name, lil'un?" She proclaimed, settling down a touch. She ducked through an ancient doorway and into another hall, a set of doubledoors at its far end.
"Seska." She said, simply.
"Seska, neh? Sounds foreign to me. Well then, yer one lucky lil lass, y'know it? If that patrol'd spotted you..." She shuddered. "Well, they'd probably just kill you. That'd be better than being taken to one of the barons, and that'd be a fact." She said, coldly. She pushed on the corroded steel bar at waist height, but it didn't give to mere pushing. She kicked it and the doors flung open and then fell off their hinges. "Shits' fallin apart anymore here up north, I tell ya." She said, spat upon the threshhold to avert the ancient evil of this city and its confounded skyscrapers.
"Where are we going?" Seska asked, uncertainty edged into her voice. It was a big place. She had walked and walked and walked and there seemed no end to it, just lines of mountain-sized buildings stretching on into the hazy distance.
"Eh, I figured it might be a very good idea to get out of this city, chop-chop. Call it a hunch, but I think someone is going to be rather upset very shortly.. You can call me Aeyliea, 'r just Aey since' thats easier." Said the redheaded christened Aeyliea, who began to push on ahead down another similar, yet narrower, street. Seska noticed that Aey had picked something up on the way through that building. She had a pack slung over one tattered shoulder, and a great big and above all else, sharp looking curved sword on her back. The gun was in its holster.
If Seska had actually known more of this world, she would definately have noticed the old sticks of dynamite sticking out of the top of the pack.
She found out anyway. Halfway down the street, heading into what Aeyliea called the 'suburbs', there was a very loud boom in the distance behind them.
Aeyliea said there would be much gnashing of teeth.
You could bet you life on it.
*****
They broke into a dead run. Seska just had enough time to look behind her before Aeyliea put on a burst of speed, and what she saw was astonishing.
A building, made of that strange concrete and steel, rippled as it fell, sending plumes of dust and rust in explosive rings as each story fell upon the next. It happened fast, in seconds, and then all there was was a ball of smoke, dust, and flame as a second set of booms roared over the ancient city. She didn't bother to watch after; she was too busy dodging detritus left in the street in times gone by.
The ran pretty for an hour, not pausing to get there breath, though Seska expressed a deep wish to do so many times. Aeyliea would only warn that the sooner they got away from that city and its' denizens the better. So they ran,slowing the pace rather than stopping, until the city degenerated into woodlands. Amid the tree's old structures, practically every one of them collapsed. Here and there a ghostly doorway would peer out of dense under growth beneath the choked woodlands' branches. Neither Aeyliea or herself would even dream of taking refuge in one of those rotten buildings.
"Theres' a place 'ere we can rest through the day 'n night. 'ts safe enough, least 's safe as you'll find here in the badlands." She puffed, but said nothing more, despite Seska's frequently gasped questions.
Hours more passed in silence. Behind them was silence, as was in front of them. The road had eventually rotted away itself, leaving a wide track in the land that was level and rocky, easily traversed at speed.
Short distances are relative things, thought the girl as she ran behind the warrioress, clutching at her dress and trying not to trip and fall. Last time I bothered to get away from a place fast I just rode a horse, thought Seska, wrily. Perhaps there were no more. Perhaps all there were strange carriages like that one she called a car.
They rose out of the valley that the city sat in, rising out of the depth and into the foothills of mountains still distant. When they reached its summit, before descending into the next valley and losing sight of it, both women stopped for a moment and looked back at the ancient city. It stood distant and grand. Its silent windows were eerie, foretelling of the great days and the great men whom had built them that had vanished hundreds of years prior. Aeyliea turned and continued jogging without any regret at all, but Seska stood transfixed by the sky, alien to her.
"To have missed such wonders..." She whispered, before turning reluctantly and cresting the ridge, descending into the ancient, overgrown carriageway and losing sight of that wonder.
*****
Later in the afternoon they reached the haven. Haven was a strong word for such a place of foreboding.
Seska leaned back against the inside curve of the corrigated steel pipe, lost in thoughts of her own. The woman Aeyliea had mostly disarmed herself and set about making a fire.
"This place used ta be a waterway, ya know. Perfect place t'sleep in peace up north; the ceiling caved in b'tween here and the manholes directly north and south o' us. Only way in..." She said, then pointed at the sealed manhole above. "Kinda stupid, being like goldfish in a bottle. T'would suck something fierce if they ever got in, but I figure thems that try to come in won't be quiet about it. Only one opening to shoot at, d'ya see?" She practically purred.
"Doesn't matter....I know aught of this land. Where are we?" Seska asked. Her vacant eyes drilled a penetrating and uncomfortable stare at the older women. Apparently older woman. Aeyliea shifted uncomfortably beneath that gaze.
"I don't think I know what they would 'ave called it in yer day, but they called it America before...well, before the bad times started. The world is different now, anyway. Least that was wha m'pa would always say. Said the world was twisted when the Barons came. Also said 's a wonder the Great Cities still stand, as violent as that had t'a been." She said matter-o-factly.
"The Barons?" She queried quietly.
"Aye, the Barons. Twisted beasts from out of time. Some say biblical times, but I dinnae think I can agree with that. The Barons control everything, and the dark god reigns over them and all else. Noone remembers when they came....three hundred, four hundred years ago? The ancient men tried to fight them. There's places where ye can't go 'cause the air is poisoned and the ground too. Didn't matter, anyway. The Barons destroyed the major world governments...or at least crippled most of them. Destroyed their military and all their tech-know-logikal gadgets, destroyed the things that man put in space... What was left o' human kind fled south. There they remain, forever beset by the Barons' dark beasts."
"They really did come and deliver hell unto the humans, didn't they?" Seska mused quietly.
"Well....they killed millions before they stopped their initial slaughter. Mostly now they stay in their delightful and dead cities." Aeyliea shrugged. "Sometimes they attack. In the last hundred years, since the time o' my pa's boyhood, there hasn't been an attack from them. Its as if they were waiting for something to happen."
"For me...." She said distantly, then shook her head slowly. "Why did you bring me with you?"
"Because ya didn't look like ye belonged there. And ya didn't immediately try t' rip m'throat out with yer dainty li'l teeth, neither. Counts fer a lot these days, that." She said, grinning.
"I really meant it when I said I was not human." Seska stated flatly. The grin left Aeylieas' face slowly. "Are their Sidhe that walk the world anymore?" She asked, quietly.
"Eh? Sidhe?" She replied. She mispronounced the name but Seska refrained from correcting. "I dunno." She shrugged. "Could be. I've never seen one before. Until now, anyway. Whats a sidhe?"
Seska closed her eyes and sighed. "What I am. But..." She opened her mouth a few times, and then just closed it, unable to answer that question. Sidhe were sidhe. "We are....were...might be older than humanity in its entirety but there were never an overwhelming many of us." And now its probably just one of us, she finished in her mind sadly.
"Eh, well. It doesn't matter much, now does it." She said, then sat down heavily beside the small fire. It burned smokeless and gave off decent heat and light, enough to illuminate their enclosed space. "We'll be able t'get something to eat tomorrow maybe. I've a car the next valley over. Have t'do some inventive things t'get the gas for it anymore, but it'll get us out of this damn place a lot faster.
Seska began to respond to that, but was cut short. The manhole cover was removed, and they both heard it land somewhere much too distant from the opening. Something snarled menacingly, and then dropped through the hole.
"Werewolf!" Aeyliea screamed, and was up with that strange lump of metal in her hand again. A gun, if she remembered right.
Something else leapt through the vent, but neither of them noticed it.
*****
The gun went off tree times without warning. The beast hadn't even had time to get its bearings before it was struck, twice in one shoulder an a third time in the arm. It belowed in pain, spitting curses at them that were unintelligable. And then it rushed straight across the flames and into Aeyliea's face.
Seska watched the beast knock the gun away from her carelessly. It tried to grab Aey by the arm but missed, succeeding only in digging chunks of bright, livid red flesh and blood out of her arm. Its claws dripped with her blood. Indeed, the scent of it seemed to drive the thing wild; it knocked the woman aside, licking its claws, and then dove for her again, saliva dripping off of enlarged canines.
Aeyliea raised her arm to fend off the incoming blows. Her reward for this was audible, clearly so in the enclosed space. The bone snapped like tinderwood, and she shrieked in real pain now. She screamed inarticulately, crying for help. Aeyliea looked at the beast, looked at the ground, then saw the glint of metal in Aey's gunna. She rushed over, stooping to grab the hilt of the hunting knife, and then lunged at the werewolf herself. She brought the blade down, intent upon leaving the knife in its neck.
The knife swung through empty air. It turned its attention to her just long enough to knock her back, flying a brief distance before coming down on the sandy floor. It shrieked in rage, then turned and reached down, grabbing Aeyliea by the scruff of her misbegotten cloths. She hung there, limp in its grasp. It tossed her, laughing cruelly. At least the sidhe thought so, as she closed her eyes with a grimace and consentrated. There was the odorless fire that the other woman had made; that would make a fine point of concentration.
The principle of this was simple. Even so it had eluded science for generations beyond counting.
There was a brilliant crimson flash. The report of the gun had been sharp and loud. This was softer and much longer, a fireburst that went on for five seconds or so. When it finished there was a louder crash. And then the chamber went dark.
All that was left was the fireflash in their eyes and a lingering smell of burnt hair in their noses. The wolf itself was ashes slowly settling to the floor.
Staggering, winded though she had done little, she wandered to the source of Aeyliea's pained groans. She knelt, and grabbed the womans' arm, examining it through sightless eyes. The eyes of magic looked down. Limitless as they were, more often real eyes would have served her far better. She let the limb fall, satisfied that it was just a a clean break, that it would heal quickly enough. She wiped her hands on her dirty dress, leaving smears of bright red. Fresh blood. She could smell it strongly, and suspected it would bring more company eventually. She tore strips of her dress and bound the wound as neatly as she could, on the fly, and then hauled on the womans' arm, trying to force her up.
She stirred uneasily, eyes opened to slits. "Nasty 'un....isn't they?" She queried weakly. She got onto her unsteady feet. The sidhe helped her to the ladder...much beyond that would be Aeyliea's own concern. She climbed, though it hurt her badly, and made it to the top. Seska followed shortly with Aey's weapons and gunna.
"What happened to it?" She asked once the sidhe had climbed from the deep dark down below. Seska made a gesture, suggesting that it didn't really matter. It was gone, and wasn't going to be coming back again either.
"I don't know much about them...but I'd venture a guess and say they don't hunt alone?" The sidhe hinted gently, nodding her head in the direction they had been traveling. Until now she had been meek, uncertain as to how to take this stranger. Now it seemed that fate had put them on the same path for a reason.
Aeyliea merely shrugged, wincing at the pain in her arm. "More than likely. But....I can't fight anymore, not for a while I think..." She said, trailing off. The colour had drained from her face, the sidhe noticed. Not good signs, given her current state as well. They would need to find some shelter, and fast. The night hadn't even really got started...it could only get worse.
She grimaced herself, rubbing her aching head, and then hooked an arm into Aeyliea's and began moving.
*****
It took six hours of exhausting effort, but they managed. They left the collapsed sewer and continued on, following the ancient road as it wound the the trees and cut through hills. They spoke very little, each concentrating on the next step...then the next, and so on.
Just past midnight, by the sidhe's reckoning, they passed through the decayed remains of another, smaller town. The woods had encroached here as well, tall trees standing in what must once have been streets and dooryards. As they stumbled through the nameless place, they both searched fervently from house to house, hoping to find some place that would provide shelter. Just before dawn, with the frenzied howls of their pursuit raised in frustration many miles behind them, they found one.
The building was half collapsed. To Seskas' mind it looked like an above ground dungeon, small rooms made of concrete, a wall of rusted iron bars sealing the long ago occupants into those small confines with little to no chance of escape. Once they might had represented the loss of freedom; now they represented a measure of desperate hope. The sidhe helped Aeyliea into one of the cells, its iron barred gate rusted through and collapsed to the floor, helping her into the stone-like bed. The matress had rotted long ago, leaving only dirt-like detritus to mark that it had ever been.
Then they both slept, despite the ever present threat of the werewolves and their kith and kin.
*****
When Aeyliea woke from her fevered dream, her first thoughts were that her strange companion had left her for dead in the night. It wasn't as though she could be blamed. Aey was surprised that one so young had even been this far into the Dark Lands as she had been.
Any thought that she had been abandonded was replaced by icy hands on her wounded arm. And then there was a curtain of pain to match little in the womans experience. It seemed to drive all intelligent thought from her mind, seemed to go on endlessly. Her mouth opened in a silent, cracked wail of pain.
It stopped. The strange silver-haired girl stood over her. A moment before she had not been there, and then she was. She blinked, trying to focus her thoughts but found her mind unable to obey. She merely stared, fever glazed eyes open but half empty, watching the girl work.
The sidhe left her charges side, and went to the surprisingly solid wooden desk in the antechamber to this place of cells. She had found some kind of pottery bowl and what had once probably been a glass of some kind. Using them, and her knowledge of the wilderness, she had gathered various herbs and had sat and ground them slowly into a paste. It smelled vile, like a rotten and bloated corpse on a warm summers' day. Of this she took another fingers' worth and walked back the the sickening woman, pulling back the cloth she had lain over the wound to keep the flies off.
Once again, there was searing pain, something truely not of this world....but eventually the pain melted away. In its place was a strange no-feeling, an oddness that was uncomfortable but much less so than the tear-jerking agony before it.
"What...is tha' shit?" She asked, her words slurred a little more than usual. There was a hint of anger in her tone, but the sidhe ignored it, and continued with her ritual. Aey winced as she re-bound the seeping wounds. Then she vanished to a different part of the building, and came back with pieces of carefully cut and shaped wood.
"That was a salve. It will remove the poison from your blood and lessen the pain, for a while. I had to do something. Those claw wounds were allready corrupting. If I hadn't, you'd have been dead in a day or two." She said, cooly. She knelt on the floor next to Aey, and put her icy hands around her wrist. The pain was distant this time. It was a good thing, because the girl chose that moment to set the bone. Her vision practically whited out from the appalling agony, but it passed swiftly. By the time she had reoriented her thoughts, the sidhe had allready put the splint on, tying it with more strips of cloth from her allready ragged dress.
Aeyliea said nothing, instead drifting slowly off to sleep.
After she had, Seska stood once more, stretching and arching her back and body. Muscles and joints popped and stretched, releasing her from the misery of a bad nights' sleep, if but temporarily. She left the cell, stopping only to look on the sleeping shape that was Aeyliea upon the rudimentary cot. At least the look of terminal agony was gone. If the paste she had pushed into the rather nasty gouges in her arm was to do anything, then by the time she got back she would be able to see. It was a waiting game now, but she herself had no intention of just sitting around and hoping for the best. Their pursuit had broken off at first light, but she didn't expect their luck to get any better.
She stepped out into the pale light of early morning. Thick golden light poured through the gaps in the canopy of the trees, brightening the previously eerie and dark world. By this light, she would search for something to use as a weapon.
As the hours continued to pass, her mind became more and more aware, the ill humors of such an incredibly long sleep reluctant to release her from their control.
*****
She sat indian-style and naked on the floor of the cell, a sturdy ash pole layed upon the ground in front of her. Next to that was a small pile of her long silver hair. It seemed the shimmer with an inner light. The quality of that light was both ephemeral and eternal, something to deny understanding regardless of how hard one tried.
She was busy with a delicate task indeed. One strand at a time, she was weaving a silvery net of her hair around the pole...a daunting task but for her young and agile fingers it was doable. She did not look up when she heard the rustling of cloth on cloth; her dress doing the work of a blanket where no blanket could be found.
Aeyliea sat up, and looked blearily at the work in progress. Without looking did the sidhe know what was on her face. A look of extreme puzzlement and uncertainty, most certainly.
"Good afternoon." She said, slowly and deliberately, not losing focus of the task at hand. Aeyliea mumbled something, but it was both noncommittal and in any case undecipherable.
Time passed. The web of silver grew, snaking down the pole of cleanly denuded wood. It wasn't until she was almost done that the woman in the bed finally had enough of her wits about her to ask the inevitable question.
"Wha'...what the hell're ya doing?" She asked. Her voice sounded weak still, but much stronger than in the morning. The fever light had gone out of her eyes, and in fact she looked almost healthy now.
"I'm making this stronger." The sidhe replied, annoyance in her voice. "Don't bother me. If I make a mistake I'll have to start over."
The woman remained blessedly quiet as she watched the pallid girl work.
When, at long last, she had finished the tight net, she turned, her empty violet gaze boring into Aeyliea like drills. She bore the stare for a second only.
"What d'ya mean stronger?" She asked, finally. The sidhe sighed - it was an incredibly adault sound coming from one so young (or at least apparently so). She set the staff carefully on the floor, and turned. She appeared not the least concerned that she was naked. That Aey saw clearly.
"Just that. Stronger. You still do not believe what I told you at the outset of our little quest, so here is some more proof." She replied, drily. She turned and started at the wooden pole with such an intensity that she thought the would would catch fire. Instead, each of the threads of her hair shone brightly with an inner light. In turn, each of them sank into the wood. It was as if the wood had opened to admit them and then closed silently and seamlessly. There was no sound, only an intense sensation of powerful forces at work in this small room.
Within the space of thirty seconds, the feeling vanished. Once again the pole looked like an ordinary piece of wood. There was the merest suggestion that it wasn't, but that was only inferred by the archaic glyphs that were apparently branded into the wood itself.
The sidhe shuddered, and then fell forward over her crossed legs, all the colour gone from her body. She looked like a ghost, except ghosts weren't covered with beads of sweat that glinted in the muted light of the jail cell.
Aeyliea waited a few minutes, then got up on unsteady feet, and touched the girl. She did not move, not at first. Eventually, she righted herself.
Looking into that face, Aeyliea saw the grim visage of death thwarted, and shuddered involuntarily.
"Go...try it for yourself an b-believe. Swing it at the wall with all your might and it will not b-break." The sidhe whispered, exhausted.
Aeyliea did just that. Even with her depleted strength, the swing she gave that wooden pole should have turned it into splinters.
There was only the solid, resounding thok of wood on stone. The only thing that broke was the ancient concrete, which under the impact sent a little shower of white dust to the floor.
*****
"How did you do that?!" The woman gaped at her. Just moments ago she had been half a step from keeling over from exhaustion, now this strange and new... Well, she didn't have a word for it.
"Its magick. I told you I was a sidhe, yet you ignored me. You probably still think I am nothing but a little girl, seperated from whatever remains of your civilization. I am not." Said the sidhe, pulling her dress back over her head and then pulling her hair out from under it. The grey cloth was smudged with odd green stains and the more commonplace bloodstains. She did all of these things with a slow, deliberate manner that showed more than anything else just how tiring her exercise had been. Aey would not understand just how draining it was; humans made for poor mages.
It tended to eat them from the inside out, and they also had a tendancy to ignore it until they coughed a bit of their lung up. Or went up in a mushy, wet explosion of flesh being put under strain far beyond its limits.
Aeyliea looked at the 'girl' with a hard, examining gaze. Except for the minor miracle that she had just enacted, everything about her seemed ordinary. Only the ears, which were slightly longer and ended in points, gave any indication to her ancestery. Only that and her strange, sightless amethyst eyes were unusual. She sighed dejectedly.
Seska straightened her garment out, rather effectless given its condition, then stood and turned to face Aeyliea on wobbly knees. She leaned heavily upon her newly wrought stave, grateful of its support.
"Those beasts last night....what were they?" The sidhe asked. She was aware that her companion was off kilter; now would be a prime time to gather information that might otherwise prove hard to gain. In the course of one night she had gone from a timid teenager to a much more cunning and knowledgable creature.
Aeyliea hadn't noticed yet, though. "Werewolves. They were human once..." She trailed off, unable to finish. The sidhe assumed that was because she knew nothing else of them. Everything else she needed to know she had seen first hand the night previous. Their speed. Their strength. They didn't appear to be very intelligent, but intelligence is not a prerequisite for a beast such as that that could solve any argument by force rather than wit.
Seska shifted her weight. "What else? What else lurks in this private corner of hell?" She asked, hard words for a hard question. Aeyliea just shrugged and said nothing.
After resting a bit longer, the sidhe went outside again. She was gone for about half an hour, give or take, but when she returned she came with a coney, skinned and gutted. Aeyliea had allready gotten the strange smokeless fire going again, created by a strange device with a steel canister on it. It looked old, but then everything else in this far-gone world did too.
"Why did they come for us?" She asked, as she set about preparing what would be her first meal in assumed years. It didn't take long for the smell of cooking meat filled the small space.
"Well....I kinda caused that, see. Small personal mission. The local baron had a garrison o' sorts there. I just made it vanish." She said, a smug look of satisfaction etching itself into her features.
Seska recalled the ball of smoke and flame and the thunder as they had left the ancient city, and grimaced. That did indeed explain their pursuit. It also promised them that such pursuit would not end in the foreseeable future.
"I used...oh, I dunno. Maybe sixty sticks of dynamite on the building they were in."
"Dynamite?" Queried the sidhe, unfamiliar with the word. Her mind connected dynamite with the loud explosion. It wasn't wrong, as the woman explained.
"But....wouldn't that have destroyed the entire building? Why are there any of those wolves left to chase us?"
"Probably 'cuz they had a vampire or something with them. The wolves don't have much but a rudimentary intelligence, but some of the beasts that live around the baron...." She trailed off, shuddered. "Most of them are deadly smart. And some of them can use power that we cannot understand." Power that they could not understand? The sidhes' mind filled in the blanks here. Some of the more powerful denizens of this twisted world could use magic too. The fact that Aeyliea did not know it for what it was merely confirmed the belief that humans still were unable to effectively harness such a power.
The fact that there were creatures in this world that could, however, was unsettling.
"And you....why are you here? I've know idea how I came to be here, so little I could say would be of any help. I just...have a hard time understanding why someone like you would come out here alone to stir as big a hive as that with a stick." Stirred it with a stick or sixty of dynamite, at that, her mind added. Aeyliea merely shrugged.
"Someone has to do something. All we've done is stare into the heart of darkness for a hunded years' time. The elders and lords of the last of the human domains think that the power of the Lord is vanishing, and think that eventually the poison they have spread will vanish."
But you don't think that, do you. She looked upon the lone warrioress with eyes of magick. No, she didn't think that whoever this Lord was would just up and vanish. Not with a mouthful of the world in his gob. Any such beast wouldn't stop at just a single course of such a fine dish, but would keep going until it had consumed everything.
Something in the back of her mind turned to ice, and pounded on her consious thoughts, desperate to be noticed, but even now she did not heed it.
"In fact...if they found out about what I did I could very well be in a very serious spot o' trouble, y'could say." Finished the red headed woman.
The sidhe split the cooked animal, dripping fat, and handed one half to her, before going to work on her own portion.
They ate in silence. All around them was a world filled with it.
*****
Things didn't go according to plan.
*****
The first cry shook both of them from the lethargic state of rest that they had been enjoying. The apparent safety of their refuge vanished.
The sidhe was up on her feet in a moment, her altered stave in hand. She looked warily out of the cell that had done service as shelter for the both of them over the evening and day. The cry had come from close by - much closer than she remembered those frenzied howls and yips from the night before.
A tactical error. She had assumed that the pursuit would either have given up by now, despite the obvious fact that the woman Aeyliea had done something incredibly bad to whomever owned these hunting 'dogs'; indeed, she had even assumed that they would not hunt by daylight.
Wrong.
The city in which they had resided all day long was much too overgrown to see very far through. Where houses and yard might once have been, trees and choked undergrowth now stood. Even from the relative safety of her vantage, she could see places where even in this late hour the sun could not have penetrated during the height of noon. Dark places. Places where lurking beasts could hide and snatch unsuspecting travelers to grisly fates.
Too overgrown to count, and the voices of these wolves were so intermingled that she would not dare to guess at their number. A great many of them in any case. At least a great many for the two of them alone to handle.
"How many?" She whispered, more to herself and for the benefit of her racing mind than to gain any kind of answer from the red-headed woman. Aeyliea shrugged, muttered something under her breath as she gingerly worked at gathering her weapons and belongings. They would have to quit this place immediately.
The sidhe advanced to the out-of-doors, her magic eye-in-the-sky giving her a three hundred sixty degree angle of sight. All about her the shadows gathered as the sun prepared to set once more, adding another day to her existence in this strange world that she knew so very little about. And probably will not learn much more about, either, she added in the privacy of her own head. Aey stuck her head out of the half hidden doorway, and then stepped cautiously outside. The gleam of the metal edge on her back was a comfort, much more so than the accursed weapon she called a gun. Wordlessly, they left.
Retracing steps they had followed the night before, they made their way back to the great road. It stood empty aside for the occasional tree, grown through cracks in the ancient and rotten pavement. Though they couldn't see any of the beasts that they knew even now were circling like vultures, they knew they were out there, and deadly close. Their voices gave away their general position, and it was that of a slowly constricting circle.
They went slowly up the road, ever vigilant of the swiftly approaching dangers. "You may as well toss your stick aside. It won't do much to stop these beasts." Aey whispered as they crept along. The sidhe did not reply, instead gripping the pole harder. She waited even as she moved.
It was, after all, inevitable. And she didn't have to wait long, either.
The first of the hideously mishappen beasts lurched through the trees a hundred yards ahead of them. It didn't even look remotely close to the one they had slain the night before. That one had had a wolven head but the body of a man, this one merely had the eyes of the wolf. Even from this distance they could see into those gleaming yellow beads. In them was death, and nothing else. There was no room in those eyes for consious thought, only for the glory of the slaughter.
It stopped dead in its tracks, not moving a muscle. It looked on, and then slowly raised its human head to the sky, and uttered a eerie wail. The wail was picked up by a multitude of others just like it. And then it turned to face them, and advanced cautiously.
"Not all stupid, are they?" Aey remarked, removing the gun from its place on her belt. It was an ancient thing, heavily built - a cannon that fit in the palm of your hand, Aey would have proudly said. Right now she said nothing, her face as grim as their mutual plight. She pulled the hammer back, and sighted on the beast.
For now she did not fire. Between range and lack of hostility, she saw no need to fire and waste an otherwise precious bullet. Instead they both just stared at the approaching beast.
It would have gone badly had one of the other hunters not made a sound, but that lonely sound in a world that had been dead silent since noon was a double edged sword. It alerted both of them to the presence of a second, slinking beast that had more of the wolf-man characteristics common to now ancient horror movies involving werewolves than the one standing in front of them.
But they bother turned to follow their ears, to see what the new threat was. In doing so they both took their eyes off of the first wolf (the immaterial method of the sidhes' eyesight not withstanding; she was bound by the same rules as the physical aspect of that which magic tried to replace). The first burst into a mind defying sprint, leaping over undergrowth like an antelope trying to flee a hunting predator. It almost made it to Aeyliea before she turned. Staring the devil in the eye, as it were, she fired her hand-cannon, arm jerking up and out fro mthe recoil. It didn't matter, at least to the one lone wolf, because now it was moving at incredible speed minus its head. Its last bound carried its bulk into her body, knocking her flat onto the ground. She scrabbled to get out from underneath the stinking beast, hands slipping on its fetid sweat and foul smelling blood. She slowly worked her way out from under it, eventually freeing herself from the headless carcass and smearing herself with blood from head to toe.
But one was not their only worry. The second one, the one that had inadvertently stepped on some branch in the woods, rushed forward too. So did half a dozen others from various places on the road, both near and far. This second one concerned itself with the sidhe, lunging low.
Aeyliea expected her companion to swing the staff like a club, as that was what she herself would do. Instead, she watched Seska jab one end of the thing into the beasts' belly, stopping it short of its mark. Before it had even had time to shift its moving bulk, trying to take a beclawed swipe at her face, the sidhe heaved upwards with all of her strength. The pole half-connected with the werewolfs' jaw with a solid thud. Even though it had been a half-assed strike, the beasts' mouth still exploded in a gout of blood, fragments of bone, a bits of teeth. It howled in agony. trying to backpedal away, trying to find a different avenue of approach that wouldn't get a face full of iron-hard wood as a reward. Before it had taken two steps she had struck it in the head again, gouging the flesh above on eye.
It was only then that she grabbed it with both and and brought the wooden staff down on the things head like a great axe. Bone snapped, blood flew, and the beast began to go down, even as she turned to stop the frenzied attacks of a third hunter, blocking a swipe at her head that would have fairly easily knocked it off.
There was another violent crash, and the beast that Seska had been desperately parrying blows from fell backwards, its right shoulder suddenly a mass of livid red flesh with a gaping hole in the middle. When the blood began to flow, it came in a great stream, spurting with each thump of the great beasts heart, but still it wouldn't go down. Instead it changed its target, leaping nimbly past the sidhe. With one swipe of its great taloned hands it knocked the coffin-maker from the human, and if it had landed its second blow it would have ripped her throat out.
Instead its head collapsed like a paper cup underneath a bootheel, and once again there was a great splatter of blood and bone. Both of them were now smeared with blood, none of it there own. At their feet were three dead or dying werewolves....but more were coming.
A lot more were coming.
They looked at each other, and grimaced. A dozen more were approaching, but instead of rushing in as the three losing contenders at their feet had, they walked at an easy gait.
No. There wasn't twelve. There were thirteen.
And then the wolves stopped, forming a loose ring about the two women, and that thirteenth creature approached.
Aeyliea went pallid, all the colour draining from her in mere seconds. Before either could do anything else, there was a blue of motion.
Aeyliea fell to the ground, unconsious.
And then there was just Seska and this strange, well dressed beast in front of her. It was not human, no more than she was.
The icy fingers of familiarity toyed with her spine as her sightless eyes stared into pitiless beads of pure black. The thing grinned at her, and on its breath she could smell the odor of soured blood.
"Our displeasure is your displeasure, m'lady." It said, a look of cold, mocking amusement upon its sharp and aqualine features. And then its hand was at her throat, a grip as strong as steel. The world began to grey out, but before she slipped into the abyss, she got to see what they did to her companion. The horror of it was completely lost to her, though, as her eyes slipped closed.
GM Ordo Draco | Co-GM Demonic Reality | GM Revenant & Calael
And when the men on the chess board get up and tell you where to go.
And you've just had some kinda mushroom, and your mind is moving low.
Ask Seska. I think he knows...